Probably not but one can hope… to the Fediverse lemmings!
I suspect these changes come from very different motivations. My guesses are ① Reddit needs money, and ② Twitter engineering has been brain-drained.
Reddit’s changes are a desperate attempt to please investors. This is a standard tactic for tech startups that are having trouble showing a profit: figure out what the company has been giving out for free, and start charging for it. They looked at API traffic and said “what do we have to do to monetize this?” and the current situation followed directly from that.
This is not just a vague appeal to “the market”; there are specific big-money investors involved, and they will have been communicating directly with Reddit management on what they want to see from the platform. CEO Huffman is probably listening to specific advice (or demands!) from those investors, and making policy changes to appeal to them.
Twitter’s situation is quite different. The goal of Musk’s takeover was political: to reverse Twitter’s user conduct policies, which had led to Donald Trump and other fascists being banned from the platform for shitty behavior.
Twitter is falling apart on a technological level right now because most of its skilled engineers have quit, leaving the company no longer capable of responding effectively to technical problems.
I think you’re right about Reddit. I think Spez probably knows the recent changes are too heavy handed, but has been painted into a corner having tried and failed to monetise Reddit “his way” for years.
Now his investors are forcing change and he either has to see it through or quit. But now users have turned on him he really has nothing left.
I agree about Twitter. I don’t understand how they intend to be profitable by making sure their users can’t use the website after 600 tweets read. This means less eyes for their advertisers, I would understand limiting within a short period of time like 600 in a half hour but 600 per day is pretty low considering how short tweets are. I can’t imagine they are going to be able to sell many advertisements without the users bothering to see them in case they run out of their daily limit.
Don’t forget YouTube disabling the video player all together if they catch you using an adblocked
This is a big concern for me, I use YouTube a lot on desktop browser with uBlock Origin. It will be crushing for me when they shut that down. I have no viable alternative to YouTube. It’s not just that, Google is forcing everyone to the Manifest V3 extension platform which reduces adblock capability on Chrome. So it’s like a double whammy. I can move to Firefox to avoid that, but I’m in a corner with YouTube. Seriously the internet is mostly intolerable without a blocker like UBO.
To be honest, I really love YouTube and I want to support creators, so I don’t mind watching ads. I’d rather pay to get rid of them, but I hate how YouTube force you to take YouTube Music as well. I’d definitely pay a fiver a month to nuke ads from just YouTube though.
I don’t get that though, it’s not possible to block YouTube ads, so the adblocker, ublock etc, is only blocking ads on other websites unrelated to YouTube. It’s got nothing to do with them.
So… What gives?
They work great on desktop browsers, maybe yours isn’t configured right?
And on Android there are alternatives…
I watch a lot of YouTube though (mostly science channels) so I will probably be forced to start paying. I don’t like it.
I don’t think I have ever seen any ads on YouTube on any of my devices. Only seen ads and was utterly chocked by it on other people devices. Adblock on youtube certainly works.
Use VPN, switch country to turkey, pay 20 bucks for a year of youtube premium. It sucks, but 20 bucks is more affordable than the 10 per month they are asking.
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I’m lazy, I use NewPipe and Firefox for Android (with uBlock), and I just don’t see ads. Arrg!
I do try to buy stuff from creators I care about though so they keep going, but I will not use YouTube directly as long as they track everything I do.
Yes Newpipe is godsend!! YouTube on my terms😅😂
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I’ve been blocking YouTube ads with Ublock Origin for years on desktop and with Vanced on mobile. It’s definitely possible.
Huh interesting, I have ublock origin in chrome and it’s never blocked a YouTube and, I was under the impression that Google does clever stuff to basically serve ads the same way as videos, so you can’t block one without the other.
I used to use Vanced too, until it was discontinued the other year :-(
Most of my YouTube watching is on my LG WebOS TV though, and unfortunately even pihole DNS blocking, the only thing I can do with the TV, can’t block any of it :-(
Vanced discontinued development, but the app itself continues to work. Plus, I’m pretty sure they just rebranded and re-released a different app that doesn’t just rip off YouTube’s logo and whatnot. I just don’t know what it’s called now. ReVanced, I think.
You can absolutely block YouTube ads with ublock
It works on desktop. Also Sponsorblock blocks those annoying in-video ads.
it’s not possible to block YouTube ads
Why would you think that?
You watch an ad, the marketing company pays youtube
then youtube pays the creator a share of that
and youtube uses the rest for their employees, server fees etc
Bravo browser on Android does a great job at blocking ads on YouTube. After the demise of Vanced this is how I watch YouTube.
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it’s not possible to block YouTube ads
Why would you think that?
It’s clear that something is going on. At least for Reddit and Twitter, they need to make money. They’ve made that pretty obvious but it is curious why now. Facebook and others didn’t seem to have this issue. YouTube sounds like google just Google
I’m not sure how Lemmy will last if it grows massively. But I’m here for a good time not a long
The interest rates went up, and it broke Silicon Valley’s infinite money cheat, so they are all under pressure to become profitable.
I was thinking similar. Might be the dot com crash 2.0. No more free money at insanely low interest rates
Central banks, especially in Europe and North America, are raising the rates. Lending money isn’t cheap anymore and running a service on debt only becomes a headache.
Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.
Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.
That’s a good point. Wikipedia isn’t a for-profit company so they don’t have to show insane profit every quarter in order to calm shareholders. I donate to Wikipedia all the time cause I appreciate what they provide.
Facebook and others didn’t seem to have this issue
maybe because Facebook already required users to login before seeing most of the content?
Could be. but i would argue that would be worse than a free-to-view website that just ran ads as you didnt need sign up or anything to view them.
Yes. You will gradually see all corporate centralized social media wall itself off over the next couple years into a tiny, heavily monetized little walled garden.
The free-money monetary policy that has funded the explosion of Internet companies since 2000 is over. Inflation is up and central banks are putting emergency tourniquets on the cash pipes that these companies need to burn endlessly to keep the “free to use” model operating.
There’s another thread where people is saying that Twitter didn’t pay Google to use their cloud so they have to “shrink” their use of the service so they are limiting access.
Corporates are definitely getting greedier. What’s disturbing is that they’re following on Musk footsteps
Lemmings!
Let’s please not start the “redditor” like bullshit here, thanks.
I was unaware of this. Context: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-exceeded/index.html .
CNN has reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
That tracks. Well done Elon
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Who?
Implosion of Reddit? Hell yes, there’s absolutely no doubt that they’ve officially Digg’d themselves.
Implosion of Twitter? Nah, only the celebrities and famous journalists there can decide that. Whether a bunch of regular users leaves the platform won’t threaten it, because most people join social media like Twitter and Instagram that have a concept of “following” only to… follow celebrities. You can have Fediverse alternatives like Mastodon but they won’t threaten Twitter unless celebrities move there, which is very unlikely because celebrities so far simply don’t care.
Really hoping we get through the growing pains quickly.
TikTok is still huge
TikTok is chinese
they’re basically government funded. And they have a lot of money … a lot more, than ANY company.
And overall I bet the social media in China isn’t going anywhere. Tho we’re pushing the definition of corporate here.
